More Information

2010 National Book Award Finalist,
Fiction

Lionel Shriver

So Much For That

Bret Anthony Johnston:
Congratulations on So Much for That being named
a Finalist for the National Book Award in fiction. This
is your ninth book. How did the writing of this novel
compare to the work you’d done previously?

Lionel
Shriver: Well, novels never get any easier—a
dismaying discovery of mid-career. Quite the opposite.
Younger, I was more prone to exhilarate (“this
book is going to be fantastic!”). In my decrepitude,
I’m convinced every ongoing project is a debacle,
and these days I never have any faith a book is working
until I’ve written the last line. That said? Writing
the last two lines of So Much for That was
exhilarating, in that jump-up-and-down vein of yore.
I may have pulled off the best ending I’ve ever
written, and endings are something of a specialty for
me. When I bashed out that last, simple, tiny paragraph,
I knew the novel worked.

The challenge of writing this
one was to tackle such overtly dismal subject matter—death
and disease—with brio and humor. I’ve never
aimed to write worthy fiction, and believe a novelist’s
primary purpose is to entertain. I do think I managed
to pull off a novel taking on mortality and even a killjoy
subject like American healthcare that’s improbably
funny, energetic, suspenseful, and not, I repeat
not, depressing. (Thus I’ve been distressed
when even positive reviewers have sometimes described
the book as “bleak.” I much prefer a review
like the one I got in USA Today that describes
the book as hilarious.) Still, when I try to assure
prospective book buyers that this book is fun to read,
they never believe me.

BAJ: In the fiction category this year, each of the
novels seems heavily researched. What role does research
play in your writing process?

LS:I do plenty of research, because I’m
writing in the realistic tradition. I make lots of things
up, of course, but I like for my readers to be able
to trust that the nonfiction backdrop of the story is
accurate. I’m also a pretty prolific journalist,
and through writing for newspapers have come to appreciate
the importance of factual truth. So I was relieved when
the Science Times section of the New York Times had
a doctor review this novel, and that reviewer reported
there wasn’t a single medical error in the book.
Whew.

BAJ: Do you remember
your original idea for So Much for That? How
closely does the finished book correspond to what you
first had in mind?

LS:I was reading a New York Times article
on-line about the fact that 1) the leading cause of
bankruptcy in the US is not, as my neighbors in Britain
might imagine, flat-screen TVs, but medical bills, and
2) the majority of Americans who go broke from medical
bills have health insurance. After I recovered
from my usual morning bout of outrage, I thought: that
sounds like a novel. And then I thought: why don’t
you write it, dummy.

For at the time, one of my
very closest friends was being treated for mesothelioma.
Her illness and subsequent death hit me very hard, so
medical issues were on my mind. But it was only when
I came up with the premise—the notion of a protagonist
who has saved his whole life to quit the Western rat
race and embark on what Shep calls in the book “The
Afterlife” in a bargain-basement Third World country,
but whose plans are waylaid by his wife’s sudden
illness—that I had a novel on my hands, and not
just a topic. I started with the idea of that first
chapter, in which Shep announces he’s bought plane
tickets and he’s leaving with or without his wife,
and she announces that he can’t go because she
needs his health insurance. Your basic frustrated quest.
Then I went about designing subplots, all of which would
be medical in nature. I played around with six or seven
of these, and then whittled them down to three.

The published version hews
perfectly to my original vision. But then, I tend to
design books in some detail before I begin writing them,
so that’s not very surprising. Maybe it’s
that Protestant upbringing: I’m rigid, goal-oriented,
linear, and what the Brits call “bloody-minded.”

BAJ: So Much for
That is dedicated to Paul “In loss, liberation.”
Do you have a reader in mind as you write?

LS:I suppose first of all I write to amuse myself,
since if I’m not entertained by what I’m
writing then strangers haven’t a hope in hell
of being entertained. It’s true that in this case
I had in mind two people in particular I wanted to please,
or at least to do right by: my late friend Terri, and
her husband Paul. I’m so sad that Terri never
lived to read this book, because I think she’d
like it. She’d certainly have got a kick out of
its being shortlisted for the NBA. If anyone’s
got connections, let me know how I might get her the
message.

As for her husband Paul, who
is also a dear friend, I was terribly anxious about
his reaction. I’m leery of anyone in my life who
helps to inspire my books feeling used, robbed, or invaded.
Maybe it’s even more of a tribute to Paul’s
natural generosity than the book itself: he bought ten
copies.

However, in the big picture
I write for an audience of people I’ve never met.
By the final draft I’m looking for anything in
the prose that’s prospectively boring to strangers.

BAJ: What role does
setting play in your writing?

LS: Some. Shep Knacker is a Jobian everyman, and
this book could probably have been set any number of
places in the US. But I know New York and the surrounding
area very well. Besides, if I wanted Shep to yearn to
escape his life, it made sense to choose a setting where
life for everyone is complicated, harried, and expensive.

BAJ: How much of the story do you know before
you start? Is your imagination liberated by parameters—such
as writing toward a specific ending or knowing you’re
exploring a particular theme—or is it fueled by
a lack of stricture and the act of discovery? These
aren’t mutually exclusive positions, but I wonder
if you find yourself on one side more often than the
other.

LS:As I mentioned earlier, I’m a planner.
How often do you get in your car with no idea where
you’re going? For me, writing a novel is the same
thing: I need a sense of direction, and preferably a
map.

BAJ: At the heart of
So Much for That is a powerful and scathing indictment
of the health care system, and yet the characters never
feel like mouthpieces or personifications of specific
agendas. How did you achieve such a fine balance in
the narrative?

LS: With difficulty, since the state of American
healthcare enrages me. I knew I had to guard against
inserting set-piece diatribes that hewed too closely
to my own political views. It helped to make my protagonist
(unlike me) a moderate, reasonable person who is always
willing to see things from others’ points of view,
and who (unlike me) is slow to anger—so slow that
you never see him seethe until the very, very end of
the book (by which time the reader is relieved).

Also, the character who does
spout diatribes, Shep’s best friend Jackson, gets
away with it because 1) these diatribes are quite funny,
and readers will forgive you anything so long as you
make them laugh, and 2) your author has viciously undermined
his authority. If Jackson were erudite, well-educated,
lucid, and supremely confident, the reader would inevitably
think when he lights into a tirade, “Oh, God,
there goes Shriver in rather poor disguise, mouthing
off again.” Instead Jackson has only a high-school
education, and talks with the unconvincing bluster of
a working-class autodidact. Not to give too much away,
but his botched plastic surgery destroys his credibility,
as it puts a question mark over his intelligence in
any life-skills sense.

BAJ: What was the biggest
surprise you encountered while writing So Much for
That?

LS: That it was possible to kill off that many
main characters and still pull off a happy ending.

BAJ: What was the biggest
challenge?

LS: As noted, making illness and death great fun.
Otherwise, I was anxious about writing a bedside death
scene, because I’d never experienced watching
someone die. Even more was I anxious about writing a
scene that I won’t cite, lest I ruin the novel
for folks who haven’t read it—but anyone
who has read it knows the one I mean. I am told I did
John Irving one better.

BAJ: Another similarity
among the Fiction Finalists this year is the use of
an alternating narrative point of view. You grant readers
access to different characters’ consciousnesses
throughout the novel. While this isn’t a necessarily
new narrative technique, I wonder if its current prevalence
isn’t indicative of something in our culture.
Maybe it’s a feeling of disjointedness or fracturedness,
or maybe a longing for a broader community. What led
to your decision to employ different points of view?

LS: No, I don’t recognize any of that disjointedness
or broader community stuff. Writing about cancer risked
creating a sense of claustrophobia for the reader, a
sense of being trapped. I wanted one alternative to
Shep’s point of view to give the book more space
and scope, and to provide the reader relief from Glynis’s
story. For most of the book the points of view roughly
alternate, although I threw in two Shep chapters in
a row early on to give myself formal permission to break
the pattern; strict alternation would be too predictable
and confining. But I didn’t prefer more than two
points of view, because (with wonderful exceptions,
like Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers)
the more points of view you include, the more you can
diffuse the focus and put a drag on narrative drive.

However, there is one chapter
written from Glynis’s point of view. By that late
juncture in the book, you’re relieved to get inside
her head. My editor loved that chapter, which—I
just remembered this, and it makes me smile—she
swore “would win me the National Book Award.”
Yet when she begged me to write more from Glynis’s
perspective, I said no. After all, one of the things
that makes this novel palatable, or more palatable than
it might be, is that the story is told from the perspective
not of the sick, but of the well. It’s really
about being the caretaker who will survive. What makes
that Glynis chapter work is that it’s a one-off.
Stuck in her head indefinitely, you’d go nuts.

BAJ: What is the role
of the writer in the world today?

LS: Our most important role, in any larger cultural
sense? We write the books that get turned into movies.

BAJ: This is the 61st
year of the National Book Awards. How do you feel about
So Much for That being honored in the tradition
of the previous Finalists and Winners? Are there previous
NBA honorees that you’ve found yourself rereading
over the years?

LS:First off, I’ve lived in the UK for the
better part of the last 23 years, and I’m much
better known here. I don’t mean to be ungrateful
to my large British readership, which I treasure, and
of course I’ve been honored to have been awarded
one very well regarded UK book prize. But there’s
no substitute for recognition by your own country. It
means more than I can say that this novel has been shortlisted
for an American award with such an august tradition.

Previous winners include
some of the most cherished books in my library: Goodbye
Columbus, The Moviegoer, The Complete Stories of Flannery
O’Connor, The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty,
Dog Soldiers, The Stories of John Cheever, Paris Trout
(God, I love that book), and All the Pretty Horses,
to name just a few.

Bret Anthony
Johnston is the author of the internationally
acclaimed Corpus Christi: Stories and the editor of
Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative
Writer. He is director of creative writing at Harvard.
For more information, visit: www.bretanthonyjohnston.com.